Page:Ossendowski - The Fire of Desert Folk.djvu/133

Rh of the fountains that grace a thousand courts and squares. Happy city, set there among the naked mountains and stone-strewn deserts, about which the poets of Cordova, Cairo, Mecca and even Bagdad have sung their lays.

But with time this opal of the desert attracted too many inhabitants and with the multitude acquired that pollution of river and canal which brought in its train disease and death. Already in the thirteenth century the Arab doctors realized that the epidemics had their source in contaminated water and ordered that the people should drink only the life-giving fluid taken from distant mountain springs and streams. This necessity has led to the building up of a distinct caste of honest water-carriers, who bring their supplies from great distances, even at times from a renowned spring nearly ten miles away from the city. Besides being honest the seller of water is also somewhat of a sorcerer, for, when he fills his skin, he murmurs a magic formula, makes traditional passes and wets the outer surface of his bag in a prescribed manner, and he possesses likewise a talisman against epidemics and carries a bell to frighten the djinns of illness.

Even though the people are thus protected by the honesty of their water-purveyors, one has not to remain long in this city of two hundred thousand inhabitants to realize that the French engineers have before them a very difficult and delicate task in transforming the canals that have come down from the times of the Almohades and Merinides into a modern sanitary system, for this will require not only the abandonment of many of these sacred canals but also a change in the river-bed and the